If anyone out there still believes Obama to be the “deporter-in-chief,” now would be a good time to stop.
The moniker is an oft-cited, erroneous claim repeated ad nauseam by amnesty activists or liberal policymakers looking to justify the president’s lackadaisical immigration enforcement policies. But unfortunately for Americans who think the law is actually worth the paper it’s printed on, this claim doesn’t hold up against the data. This inaccurate assertion is based on the number of “removals and returns” cited each year by the administration, but fails to distinguish how many of those “returns” occurred at the border (i.e., not a true “deportation”) versus how many persons are actually arrested and removed from inside the United States – a significantly smaller number, and dropping.
And it doesn’t take much digging to find out. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently released its Fiscal Year 2016 report which stated that as a whole, the Department of Homeland Security – which houses both U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement – removed or returned a total of 450,954 illegal aliens last year alone, each counted as a “deportation” by the term’s weakest definition.
However, a closer look at the data reveals that the vast majority of these “deportations” claimed by the Obama administration took place at or near the border – meaning they weren’t actual “deportations” at all. These…